Chance Operations at the Hospice Luis Plaza Dañin

Related Books:

I (like to) believe that in the year 2002, when I started to write my first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, I approached English, my second language, as a system that, through minor detonations of syntax, could be restructured to accommodate my preoccupations. Constraining the use of conjunctions to contort sentences? Worked. Blanking parentheticals after writing them (no seas curiosa Jessica) and then trying to write about their potential content to dramatize blanks in memory? Did not. Relying on chance to retrofit associations into a mostly blank memory of my time at the Hospice Luis Plaza Dañin? Perhaps.

At my Jesuit high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I belonged to a volunteer group known as the apostolic group. Every Saturday we visited the old and the infirm at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin. I don’t remember much about my time there besides a long hallway, benches, baskets with bread. Why the impulse to write about what’s mostly a blank? A cynic (like me) might contend that, since the hospice experience fits into the coming of age narrative (boy visits the old and the infirm, hands them bread and milk, realizes the world contains unspeakable suffering, etc.), I am, in retrospect, assigning great significance to my time at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin. The contention of the cynic (still me) faces complications. Since back then I’d wanted to become a Jesuit priest, those visits to the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin were obvious manifestations of that impulse to become a Jesuit priest, an impulse that to this day provides a dangerous type of solace, incidentally, because if you persist in seeing yourself as the Jesuit priest boy who cared for the old and the infirm, you are prone to overlook the almost nothing you are doing for others now.

How to write about mostly blanks? Of course I could have retrofitted so-called telling details, scents, quirks of character, sequences out of the Conflict-Action-Resolution machine, but because the rest of my life already contained so much machine crap (dayjobs, ads, diaper dialogues), and because I believed literature’s sole purpose was to not be machine crap, I attempted alternatives.

How about if I open three books at random, I thought, jot down whatever I find compelling in those pages, and see if what I jot down yields any associations that I can outstretch along the long hallway of the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin? Not everything in chance is chance, John Cage said. One must learn to ask the right question: what are the three books that come to mind when I think of the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin? The answer came quickly: The Book of Psalms, The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, The End of Story by Lydia Davis. The first two came to mind because of their religious associations (the cover of my edition of The Book of Disquiet contains a man in agony, though later someone pointed out the man is just a goalie failing to catch a soccer ball). The End of The Story came to mind because to me it’s a performance of how forgetting the contours of the loved one does not diminish the intensity one feels for the loved one.

According to my notes, on March 3rd, 2012, I completed the first cycle of opening each of these three books at random. The next day I completed three more. Only the first two cycles yielded immediate reactions. The reactions to the passages below are from 2012, the reactions to my reactions from 2016.

(1) From The Book of Psalms: Do not be mute and do not be quiet, god.

Reaction: What did the elderly think of us? Were they really waiting for us on that long hallway? Or were they always there in the afternoons? Where else would they go? None of them had their own room.

Reaction to reaction: The muteness of god many of us members of the apostolic group would experience years later, the muteness of the elderly over the years since I couldn’t remember anything they’d said to me, the white noise of the train in The Silence by Ingmar Bergman — all of these might have played a role in wondering what the elderly thought of us. I remembered an immense room we weren’t supposed to enter or didn’t want to enter but did, an empty room with tall ceilings and rows of beds where those who were too sick to walk to the long hallway remained.

(2) From The Book of Disquiet: Most people are other people.

Reaction: Did I wonder who the elderly were as I am doing now? Who were they when they were young? Did they also spend their lives in pursuit of something they didn’t want?

Reaction to reaction: We were probably too enamored with our role as saviors of the old and the infirm to wonder who they were, although it isn’t farfetched to imagine many of us did ask them who they used to be, or perhaps they told us without us having to ask them, given we did spend hours sitting next to them on the benches along the long hallway.

(3) From End of the Story: When I returned he said very little to me and kept turning away from me, and because he kept turning away from me, I was frightened and couldn’t sleep.

Reaction: Perhaps there’s an elderly man along the long hallway who, because he kept turning away from us, frightened us?

Reaction to reaction: I can see now why I might have found this passage about turning away compelling. It’s easier to invent someone who’s turning away from you because you don’t have to imagine a face. I also associated this turning away with the men in “The Subway” by George Tooker, although in that painting the men are not turning away but staring in hiding. To imagine the old and the infirm turning away from me felt like the correct representation of them. No matter how often I’ve tried to dismiss the almost blank memory of the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin, the feeling that every Saturday we abandoned the old and the infirm has not subsided. This pious retrospective, the cynic (you know who) might add, is useless. Except perhaps to create the illusion you’re a good person. I don’t disagree. Fiction isn’t meant to be useful though. These are just my attempts at remembering my time at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin.

The rest of the cycles did not yield enough variations in the material. Seek his presence always, The Book of Psalms said, for instance, but I already knew the answer to the reaction I’d jotted down (and yet was god’s presence to be found in that long hallway?). Asleep, I was even more helpless against them, Lydia Davis wrote, and yes, I was helpless against the memory of old and the infirm, whether I was asleep or awake, but how to represent this helplessness without overdramatizing the minute impact of this helplessness?

Perhaps I did not ask the right question. By focusing on books that linked too closely to the hospice Luis Plaza Dañin, I wasn’t likely to unearth new material. For other sections of The Revolutionaries Try Again, I had already tried to focus on books that had no relationship to my content in the hopes that this juxtaposition (the streets of Guayaquil + interviews with John Cage, for instance) would inject new language into content I was too familiar with. But I wasn’t after new material. I was after an atmosphere in which to think about the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín. Since I had already decided not to invent what I couldn’t remember, the exercise of chance might have created an atmosphere in which to obsess about what I could remember, and it was this narrowing of obsession that (I like to believe) yielded the first series of sentences I would later call “performance of an impulse,” a type of sentence that eschews narration (for the most part) but creates dramatic tension by obsessing on the impulse behind the sentence. Here, then, is the performance of the impulse to remember the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín, which appears in chapter XIII of The Revolutionaries Try Again:

The long hallway where the old and the infirm waited for the apostolic group, Leopoldo thinks, the long hallway like a passageway inside cloisters or convents where the old and the infirm waited for the apostolic group every Saturday from 3:00 to 6:00, the long hallway with its hollowed benches alongside its walls where the old and the infirm waited for the apostolic group to hand them sugar bread and milk, where the apostolic group performed cheerfulness and chattiness for the old and the infirm, the long hallway that’s probably empty at night just as it is empty for Leopoldo tonight despite all those Saturdays he’d spent there when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, all those Saturdays he spent in that long hallway at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín trying to cheer up the old and the infirm who’d been forsaken by their families or who had no families or who had nowhere else to go, who had toiled in menial jobs the entirety of their lives just like the masses of people Leopoldo will encounter inside the bus on his way to Julio’s party tonight — did you even ask the old and the infirm about their jobs, Leopoldo? what could you have possibly said to them to cheer them up? did you actually cheer them up or were you simply a reminder to them that god’s blessings were elsewhere like they’ve always been? — whose last days were spent along a sunless hallway that smelled like the eucalyptus and menthol ointments they rubbed on their chests, which must have reminded them of the Merthiolate their mothers would swab on their scraped elbows and knees, whose last evenings were spent on donated hospital beds inside rooms with unreasonably high ceilings (why did the Jesuits build those rooms with such high ceilings? so that when the time came for the old and the infirm to die the priests could direct them to the vast pointlessness of the lord above?), inside rooms where Leopoldo and Antonio would stroll among the donated hospital beds with their bread baskets just in case they missed someone on the hallway, just in case someone couldn’t get out of bed but still wanted a sugar bun (what did the Jesuits think this exposure to the suffering of the old and the infirm would do to a band of scrawny fifteen year olds? did the Jesuits think that it would change their lives? that they would grow up to be stalwarts against suffering and injustice instead of growing up to be just like everyone else except every now and then they feel guilty about the suffering of the old and the infirm yet at the same time feel superior to everyone else because they were such good Samaritans then?), the long hallway where the faces and names of the old and the infirm continue to slip from him, year after year one more conversation or gesture or emotion vanishing from that long hallway like a punishment, although if you ask him about it Leopoldo will tell you that he’s not fifteen anymore and does not believe in punishments handed down from a god who’s in any case too busy not existing just as Leopoldo’s too busy not existing or barely existing in that long hallway in the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín.

Something doesn’t feel right about defining my novel, about giving it a genre (a word that has always conjured for me cover images of bursting corsets and rippled abdominals). Something doesn’t feel right about defining novels at all.

Sara Michael is a Baltimore-based writer who spent two and a half years as a reporter for the Baltimore Examiner, most recently covering health and science. She has also covered technology for a national trade magazine, and earned her master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern University. For more on Sara and her writing, visit www.saramichael.org.For weeks, and perhaps months, after the Baltimore Examiner launched nearly three years ago, people said it would fail. Some gave us six months, or a year, before folding. They expected it. There’s no way a newspaper can launch from scratch and be delivered to roughly 250,000 homes for free, they said. There’s no way a major city newspaper can sustain itself on ad sales alone.In the end, they were right. It did fail, but the Examiner was – and still is in Washington and San Francisco – an experiment in news delivery. As newspapers downsize staff, go online only and cut pages, the Examiner tried something different. And before the last edition hit doorsteps and newsstands last Sunday, we had managed to challenge the legacy paper in town and make a name for ourselves among readers and sources.The premise for the Examiner was targeted delivery six days a week to a specific number of homes fitting a profile, such as living close to a shopping center, having kids and making good money. There were also bright red news boxes around the area. The stories were shorter – between 300 and 400 words with longer features once a week – and ledes were punchy and headlines sexy.I started at the Examiner on Aug. 1, 2006 covering Howard County, a suburb about a half hour outside of Baltimore. I joined a staff of about 20 other reporters (an all-time high in staffing levels at the paper), all young and either just starting out in journalism or just a few years in. Already, just five months after the launch, about a dozen reporters had started and quit the Examiner, many fed up with the crushing hectic pace.Two stories a day, at least – that’s what was expected of us. And these aren’t press release rewrites; we’re talking fully reported (three source minimum) news stories. I wasn’t sure it was possible, and struggled a bit in the beginning to come through, but after a couple months, I was cranking out at least that much each day. It’s amazing where you can find stories – though arguably, many of the stories I and others wrote didn’t deserve even 300 words. I found myself covering the minutia of a Planning Board decision, the details of each interim report, and countless angry neighborhood associations miffed by some planned development.The pace was break-neck. The days flew by as we all scrambled to make calls, go to meetings and pressers and sum it all up in 350 words by 6 p.m. (That’s right, add to the unreasonable story counts equally unreasonable deadlines.)Looking back, it’s hard to say what kept me or any of the other reporters there. Many days – ok, most days, especially in the first several months – I would come home drained, emotionally and physically exhausted. Some mornings, I would arrive to the office only to see egregious errors in my story in the paper. I once wrote a story about a group of parents who wanted a stop sign at an intersection frequented by young kids and speeding drivers. They didn’t want to see a child hit by a car, which had happened elsewhere in the county. The subhead? “Child hit by car at same intersection.” I spent the morning fielding angry calls from county officials and neighbors.It’s a start up, they kept saying. We’re still working out the kinks with the copy desk. And some of it did smooth out.We were motivated by what I imagine motivates most newspaper reporters. There are stories that need to be told, deals that should be investigated, information that readers need. As we continued to ask tough questions and write complete, balanced stories, our reputation grew. Fewer people called to complain about the paper being dropped off each morning on their doorstep. Instead, they started to pick it up and liked what they read: interesting, well reported news stories, many that were overlooked by the Baltimore Sun, which had been the only paper in town for more than 20 years and was struggling with its own newsroom cuts.We all believed in being newspaper reporters in a town that needed that second voice.Ryan McKibben, the CEO of Clarity Media, the Examiner’s parent company, blamed the closing on poor ad revenues, something about “synergies” with the DC paper that never materialized. He called it a “perfect storm” brought on by the collapsing economy. But did they have to throw in the towel before even hitting the three-year mark? I understand they were losing money hand over fist, but I am not convinced the powers that be tried everything they could to keep the paper alive, and perhaps that’s because they weren’t in the newsroom with us or even in the town affected by our presence. The paper in DC stays afloat because it gives the conservative owner Philip Anschutz a voice in Washington. But in Baltimore, we didn’t have that security.Some readers suggested they would be willing to pay for the paper, but that’s not the answer. Several months ago, we cut down home delivery to twice a week and upped the number of papers in the boxes. Why not go all online with a print edition once a week on Sundays or limit distribution just to the boxes? Regardless, I am sure we can all agree that starting up a print newspaper these days is an unreasonable venture, and in retrospect seems a little ridiculous. People barely read the print papers that have been around for 200 years, and most people get their news from aggregator sites or the online editions of major papers. As much as some of us like sitting down with the paper in the morning or taking it on the bus with us, those days are ending. Instead of tweaking the old model of news delivery, we need an entirely new model of news delivery.As a young journalist, my time at the Examiner taught me how to scrounge for stories and meet seemingly unreasonable deadlines. It also gave me an inside glimpse of what it’s like to struggle to keep a paper going every day, but mostly I just hunkered down and worked hard, as did all the reporters and editors there. At least we can say we tried something different and even thrived at it for a time. And something more radical that launching a free daily newspaper has to be done to revive the public service that is news delivery.Each morning for the final two weeks of the paper, my editor sent out an email to the editorial staff aimed at motivating us to keep up the good work in the final days. In one, he seemed to sum up what the paper was to us, to Baltimore, and perhaps to the entire newspaper landscape. In his call for good stories, my editor wrote that we should keep putting out the news, “ensuring that when some media historian stumbles across an innovative newspaper named The Baltimore Examiner, that historian shall read our names and say, holy shit, this was a real newspaper.”

Who was this person I had become? I’d never expected to fall into the parent trap. I knew that there were more important questions in the world than whether the baby had pooped that day. But in my fugue state, I couldn’t think of them.

There are precious few opportunities in life to read and be read to, and there is something utopian to me about the creation of a site like Librivox, which operates solely on people's inexhaustible appetite for reading and listening.

Five years ago, Joseph O’Neill, the author of Netherland, wrote an essay for The Atlantic entitled “The Relevance of Cosmopolitanism.” Reading it, I experienced the swelling relief of encountering another writer giving voice to shadowy certainties I had long harbored, but never managed to articulate. The essay’s final paragraph, in particular, hit me like a wonderful train (I quote it in full because it’s just too good not to):
“The relevance of cosmopolitanism is fast becoming more than theoretical. As a matter of daily reality and to a degree previously unknown, we are faced with the experiences of others everywhere. This imposes new demands on consciences and nationalistic categories. Literature is not immune from such demands; one might even suggest, since we writers are concerned with reality and conscientiousness, that literature should be unusually interested in these demands. This does not mean that a new artistic regime is upon us. Writers, in order to produce something truly worthwhile, must be ruled only by their deepest impulses, which can come from anywhere and lead in a million valuable directions. But it does seem that those who internalize the new world have every chance of writing something newly interesting.”We are faced with the experiences of others everywhere. For O’Neill – who was born in Ireland and grew up in Mozambique, Turkey, Iran, and the Netherlands, with a Turkish mother and an Irish father, who spoke to him in French and English, respectively – this wide-eyed perspective was forced upon him at a young age. His life is an extreme embodiment of globalization’s steady sprawl, but his use of “we” in the paragraph above is not accidental: in the last fifty years, a dramatic shift has occurred for most writers. Rather than nailing the “manners and morals” (as Lionel Trilling would have it) of a largely homogenous, well-known local surrounding, authors in a globalized era are increasingly tasked with depicting diverse surroundings, or diverse cultures in a single setting. And to do justice to “the experiences of others everywhere” is no small task. These are precisely the “demands on consciences and nationalistic categories” that O’Neill is referring to: finding the empathy and curiosity to write outside of “your own” culture. But what happens when you lack a nationalistic category to call your own?

Although my parents are both American, and I grew up going to English-speaking schools, I share, to some extent, O’Neill’s international upbringing. I was born in Hamburg, and, as a result of my father’s career, grew up in Philadelphia, London, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Shanghai, and Singapore. Like O’Neill, who now lives in New York, I have also settled “abroad”: I have lived in Berlin for the past six years, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere.

This six-year mark has been an interesting one for me: on the one hand, it feels like a major accomplishment, in my ability, like any good golden retriever, to “stay.” On the other hand, it’s made me think hard about why, exactly, I’ve chosen to settle in a country whose language I learned when I showed up here, whose culture, while not as foreign to me as Chinese culture, for example, is more foreign than any number of other locales I could have chosen, like England, or Canada, or, I don’t know: my passport country? Growing up all over the place makes you skilled at adapting, but it also makes you hungry to belong, something that in part motivates my writing: carving out a space I know, trying to understand what I’m witnessing around me. The experiences of others everywhere. But sometimes the ache of un-belonging feels like a stitch I’ve had in my side for as long as I can remember, and it would be nice to walk around without it.

When faced with such existential quandaries, I’ve found an excellent method of gaining insight (and procrastinating) is to ask other writers the same questions. I sent an email to several of my writer friends who have settled, to varying degrees, away from their “home” countries. Three of them generously responded: Preeta Samarasan, a Malaysian Indian novelist and author of Evening is the Whole Day, who now lives in a village in central France;Jeremy Tiang, a Singaporean playwright, translator, and fiction writer, of Chinese and Tamil descent, who now lives in New York, where his adaptation of A Dream of Red Pavillions is being developed by Pan Asian Rep; and Madeleine Thien, a Canadian fiction writer (whose works include Simple Recipes, The Chinese Violin, Certainty, and Dogs at the Perimeter) with parents from Malaysia and Hong Kong, who largely divides her time between Canada and Germany.

My questions and their responses are below. Like O’Neill’s final paragraph, I found their responses much too compelling to cut short.

Brittani: Is foreignness an inherently fertile imaginative/observational state for you? Did any part of your decision to live overseas have to do with your writing?

Preeta: Foreignness is my natural state. I’ve never lived in any place where I was part of the ethnic majority. As a Malaysian Indian, I always, on some level, felt like an outsider. Part of this was the rhetoric of my parents’ generation, which was a direct product of Malaysia’s postcolonial trajectory/social policies/economic policies. We were always told that the country didn’t really want us; that we didn’t really belong; that “there’s nothing for us here;” that we, the younger generation, should try to leave and never move back. So my decision to live overseas didn’t directly have to do with my writing — it was, in a sense, almost preordained that I would leave, no matter what I decided to do with my life I knew from the age of 3 that my goal was to get out of Malaysia. I didn’t leave because I thought it would be good for my writing, but I do think that in the end leaving *was* good for my writing, incidentally. It’s kept my eyes wide open.

As for whether foreignness is a fertile state: if we define foreignness broadly, meaning not just being an expatriate or an ethnic minority, but having the state of mind of an outsider, then I think, in fact, that foreignness is *the only* fertile imaginative/observational state, for any creative person. Creativity comes from seeing things with an “outsider’s” eyes. Sometimes we talk about this as seeing things through a child’s eyes — I think they are related. So much of creativity is making familiar things strange and strange things familiar. You can really only do this if you keep thinking like an outsider. You don’t necessarily have to leave, but if you don’t, you have to find other ways to think like an outsider.

Jeremy: [I find foreignness to be a fertile state], but I feel like a foreigner even when I’m in Singapore. Maybe “outsider” would be more apt. [My decision to live overseas] had little to do with my writing, although I find it very hard to write when I’m in Singapore. But that’s because being in Singapore longer than a couple of weeks or so makes me profoundly depressed.

Madeleine: [Foreignness] has been [a fertile state] for me, but that’s been a slow realization. I think, being outside one’s familiar surroundings, I become more aware of what is at the core of myself and what is simply habitual. I think the habitual takes up an enormous part of our consciousness. Maybe the most important thing about being away, and for me that’s mostly been China, Cambodia, and Germany, is how humbling it is. I feel my smallness in the face of extraordinarily deep histories.

How often do you return “Home”? Do those trips feed your writing? Or does your foreign locale now feel like “Home” to you? (Note: I capitalize “Home” here as a reference to a recent James Wood article, “On Not Going Home,” in which Wood writes: “It is possible, I suppose, to miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore, and refuse to go home, all at once…I have made a home in the United States, but it is not quite Home.”)

Preeta: I go back to Malaysia once or twice a year. Since I only write about Malaysia (this may change one day, but until now, I have no desire to write about any other place), feeding my writing is a very large part of the reason I go home often. I don’t go around explicitly looking for material or researching things, but everything in Malaysia feeds my writing. Every conversation, every car journey, every form I fill out, every queue I wait in, every newspaper article I read.

I’ve lived in France for nearly seven years, but no, it doesn’t feel like “Home,” and I don’t expect it ever to feel like home — not the outside world, anyway, beyond our front door. On another level, the inside of our house feels like my emotional/psychological home right now: this is where all my stuff is, all my books, the human beings I am closest to; this is where I become a mother, which has been such a large part of the person I am today. This is where I am comfortable expressing my emotions, making a mess (literal and figurative), doing whatever I need to do. The inside of my house.

Jeremy: [I return to] Singapore a couple of times a year. London, more often. I tend to have very localized homes now. Our apartment in Williamsburg feels like home, but New York doesn’t yet. And in some ways London has begun to feel foreign. All trips feed my writing, whether to “Home” or elsewhere. I thrive on dislocation.

Madeleine: I return to Canada for half the year usually; but home for me is the city where I was born, Vancouver, and which I left in 2002. I don’t return to Vancouver often. Actually, for 10 years, I rarely went back at all. I’m in Vancouver now, and the sense of well-being and familiarity has been incredibly powerful for me.

On the other hand, I felt extraordinarily at home in the many months I spent in Cambodia, and this is one of the reasons I kept returning there, and still do. Similarly with Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Berlin. Because my father is Malaysian and my mother from Hong Kong, I can often be taken for a foreigner in Canada (even though I’m a citizen, was born there, and have only ever held a Canadian passport), and taken for a local in Phnom Penh. The psychological feeling of “passing,” that is, being taken as someone who belongs, is profound. And it is strange when one cannot “pass” in the place one where was born.

Did you grow up moving around quite a bit?

Preeta: No. From babyhood until I left in Malaysia in my mid-teens, I lived in Ipoh.

Jeremy: No. My parents have lived in the same apartment for 38 years. I was fifteen years old when I had my first plane journey.

Madeleine: We moved every couple years, but within Vancouver and its suburbs, and for financial reasons. My parents started out with a house of their own, but the mortgage was beyond their means. We kept moving into smaller and smaller apartments. It was difficult but, at the same time, the city has so many pockets and neighborhoods in which I feel utterly at ease.

Are any of your favorite writers similarly displaced?

Preeta: These days I feel like I don’t have favorite writers, only favorite books. I would say that the writers by whom I was most influenced when I was first finding my feet (Dickens, Rushdie in his earlier years, Peter Carey) had a very strong sense of place; the way their understanding of geography and language and history and culture came through in their writing was much more important to me than whether they were expatriates or not. I didn’t think much about their biography.

Now, I’m very interested in writing in dialect, and I’m reading a lot of Caribbean and African writers who’ve worked in literary “dialect” – and I find that many of these writers were the opposite of displaced – they seem to have such a strong sense of their roots. I am drawn to that, too, to people who make the decision never to move, to know a hundred square feet of earth like the back of their hand rather than wandering all over the planet. I haven’t thought about this much until you asked this question, but it occurs to me now that the South Asian books/short stories I love best are not the ones that deal with physical displacement. I am generally bored by immigration-to-the-West stories. I tend to favor stories about identities that are fractured for reasons other than physical displacement. I can’t really say why this is the case!

Jeremy: Oh yes. Yiyun Li, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ma Jian. There is something about being in-between, and the lack of certainty that comes with that, which appeals to me.

Aside from these thematic connections between us, I admire them most of all because I think they are both incredibly perceptive novelists who have an astonishing facility with language and story.

Where is your creative work set?

Preeta: In Malaysia.

Jeremy: In the short story collection I am working on now, stories are set in: Singapore, Beijing, the Baltic Coast of Germany, Zurich, a Norwegian train, New York, Connecticut, Bangkok. I’ve written plays set in: Fukuoka, Scotland, Los Angeles, Middlesbrough, London, and Singapore. (A shorter answer: it’s set anywhere I’ve been, and some places I haven’t.)

Madeleine: Always, so far, between Canada and elsewhere. Cambodia, China, Malaysia. I do a lot of my work in Berlin, but processing is slow for me, and I imagine Berlin will show up in my fiction in about a decade.

Is “Home” a cloying term for you? An irrelevant/outdated notion? Or is there something throbbing and unsolved about it for you? Do you write from this place of irritation/cosmopolitanism/discomfort?

Preeta: It is a sentimental term for me, but not cloying. I am a big fan of genuine sentimentality, nostalgia, emotion — sometimes I find that contemporary writers, especially in the West, approach everything with irony, question all of these elemental states that sometimes need to be felt more and questioned less, if you know what I mean. That longing for “Home” is one of those states. I don’t think it’s something to be mocked or scorned. I don’t thinking belonging in and of itself, or the desire to belong in some way, is irrelevant or outdated, and why should it be irrelevant or outdated to feel like you belong to a place? If you can belong in a subculture, a community, a relationship, then I think you can also belong in a place. Though I said we always felt we didn’t belong in Malaysia, I also have a sharp, painful longing for the Ipoh of the 1980s. I think of it as my home, but it doesn’t exist anymore. I long for the house of my childhood and for specific material objects that were the landmarks of my small world: a pink plastic drawer pull in my brother’s closet, for example; a faux leather ottoman; a tiny Santa Claus candle. I think I write from a place of longing for home, not from a place of discomfort with the notion. But I don’t mean by this that it’s okay to romanticize home. I think you can long for something while still acknowledging its dark side, while still facing up to all that was painful or ugly or disappointing about it.

Jeremy: It’s difficult to define for me, but I think not in a problematic way. Or it means different things in different contexts. See also “family.”

Madeleine: No, [I don’t think of “home” as] cloying. I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep re-creating. A person who has lived on the same streets for 80 years can also come to moment when the streets don’t feel like home; and a person who has suddenly arrived in another place might feel suddenly, inexplicably at home. This open-endedness is in keeping with the human condition. Human beings have always migrated, have always followed resources and food, have always kept pushing into unfamiliar territory. My discomfort comes from witnessing politically motivated and divisive policies that seek to elevate certain citizens above others, based on race, religion, class, or chauvinism of any kind. I think this is when home becomes a political weapon, and the consequences are never good.